An Obituary Written From Beyond the Grave? Not Quite

The latest addition to the list? Lillian Ross, the longtime New Yorker reporter whose obituary ran in Thursday’s paper.

What binds these people together, if only in their afterlives? Each was the subject of a New York Times obituary that was written from beyond the grave.

Well, not exactly — but it may appear that way at first blush. Mel Gussow, a longtime critic and cultural reporter at The Times, had been dead for six years when his obituary of Ms. Taylor was published in 2011. Ms. Ross outlived the author of her obituary, Michael T. Kaufman, a distinguished foreign correspondent and editor, by more than seven years. And the obituary for James A. Van Allen, who discovered the radiation belts that bear his name, was published more than 10 years after the death of its writer, Walter Sullivan.

Post-mortem bylines are a rare and admittedly peculiar feature of the obituaries section of The New York Times, but they occur for a straightforward reason: Some obituaries are “advances” — written in anticipation of the death of a notable person who, at the time of writing, is very much alive.

“It’s a practical matter,” Bruce Weber, a former obituary reporter for The Times, wrote in a 2016 essay for the Sunday Review. “You can’t write the comprehensive life story of a president or a pope or a movie star in an hour or even a day.”

And so, when possible, the obituaries desk produces some of its material in advance — sometimes long in advance. An initial draft of Fidel Castro’s obituary, for example, was prepared in 1959.

And, since death is often unpredictable, for obituary subjects and their writers, the former sometimes outlive the latter, leading to a post-mortem byline.

“We don’t do it routinely,” explained William McDonald, editor for obituaries. “We don’t have many advances that were written by people who are no longer with us.”

“If the obituary lingers too long, we may have to write a fresh version,” he added. “But if we have a piece that’s sound — if the reporting is exhaustive and the writing is fine — then why throw it away just because the author has died?”

The Times has about 1,900 advances on hand; roughly a dozen of them were written by reporters who have since died. (On average, two or three obituaries written in advance are published in a given week, and the stock is replenished at about the same rate. The rest of the obituaries are written on deadline, as breaking news items.)

But many of the advances are written by older reporters — and they often sit on file for years before publication. It’s an arrangement that occasionally allows death to creep from an obituary’s headline to its byline.

In the case of Ms. Ross’s obituary, the original was filed in 1999 — an advance that she dramatically outlived. (Advances are routinely edited and updated; Ms. Ross’s had been refreshed as recently as 2009.)

On Wednesday, after learning of Ms. Ross’s death, Mr. McDonald and Daniel Slotnik, a senior news assistant on the obituaries desk, took one last look.

“We pulled the advance and updated some of the details — the cause of death, the survivors,” Mr. Slotnik said. Also added was a reference to a collection of Ms. Ross’s journalism, “Reporting Always,” which was published in 2015, after Mr. Kaufman’s death.

And when the obituary appeared in print the next day, there was Mr. Kaufman’s byline, resurrected in service of the dead.

For the obituaries desk, though, it’s all part of the routine.

“There isn’t anything specifically different with the process,” Mr. Slotnik said. “Except that obviously there’s no writer to send a final draft to.”